This book is
a work of fiction. All the characters developed in this novel are
fictional creations of the writer’s imagination and are not
modelled on any real persons. Any resemblance
to persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 9781370408474

Dedicated to my wife
Melodie and my daughter Ruth

1

The story of my life is the story of
the restless heart that Saint Augustine writes about in his
Confessions. I have a queer woman’s heart beating in my breast and
it is desire and passion that makes it restless. The heart is the
wellspring of desire and passion. At Vilanculos I felt the same kind
of excitement being churned up by the restlessness of my heart. Now
at Jan Smuts International Airport a full hour before our flight to
Madrid I feel the awakening of my restless heart. To kill time before
boarding we wondered about in the departure lounge. I struggle to
contain my excitement. This was the first time that I would be
embarking on an aeroplane flight. I was breathless with desire and
passion, I suddenly want Kate to make love to me in the women’s
toilets.

I felt as hot as hell with lust and
feelings of sensuality. Like Kate I am a sensual person. Kate
literary oozes sensuality. Now I am so hot that I am panting like an
animal on heat I want Kate to fuck me. I am a wanton woman, I feel
like whispering my fantasy of my desire in her ear: ‘I want you to
fuck me in the public toilets.’ Instead I follow her into the
Central News Agency, she says that she wants to buy a book or two to
read on the flight and on our holiday. She is oblivious of the state
that I am in. I gaze distractedly at the shelf stacked with classical
fiction. The title ‘A Thief’s Journal’ catches my eye. I flip
through pages. I am surprised, I am stunned and I am amazed. What is
this book doing on a bookshop in South Africa, how did it escape the
surveillance of the censors? The book by Jean Genet is dedicated to
Jean-Paul Sartre and Sartre has composed a foreword to the novel. I
decide that I will buy the book. I scan the other titles, thinking
that maybe there is book written by Sartre. I know about Sartre, his
name has been dropped in conversations that I have inadvertently
eavesdropped on while quietly drinking coffee in the student union’s
cafeteria from its high perch on the ridge it overlooked the lush
leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg. Now suddenly the name SARTRE
jumps out among the titles. It belongs to the novel called ‘Nausea’.
I decide to purchase the two paperback books. At the cashier Kate
looks at my two books. She has never heard of the authors. She pays
for her two murder mysteries. I find pulp fiction boring. I make a
pretence of interest while remaining silent about my personal opinion
regarding her literary tastes.

2

The boundary between the human and
the animal is artificial. It can be breached. Language and
textualization cannot fix the boundary between the human and the
animal.

There is something that it is like to
be a particular living creature. Every living creature has its own
peculiar kind of unique experience of the world in which it finds
itself. Living creatures have conscious states, they each have their
own kind of awareness, their own kind of mental states.

Insentient matter. How did conscious
arise from insentient matter?

3

Humans are fallible. So we are all
indeed capable of sin. It was in our nature to be sinners. Kate as a
practicing Catholic was also fallible as I soon discovered. She
suffered from all the human foibles. Her greatest character flaw was
her vanity. My parents thought I was going on an overseas tour with
fellow students. Instead I was going on a secret honeymoon holiday
with a woman in her mid-thirties with whom I was having a clandestine
affair. They wanted to see me off at Jan Smuts Airport. Having much
to hide about myself I insisted that it was not necessary. Anyway I
was an adult, I was grown up even though I was still nineteen. I had
experienced stuff with Kate that most adults could not even imagine
in their wildest erotic fantasies. And going overseas with an
experienced traveller would be a walk in the park compared to going
to Vilanculos and the Bazaruto Archipelago in Mozambique. Anyway Kate
was one of my lecturers, how I was going to explain my relationship
with her to my parents? As I said, I was only nineteen years old at
the time, and I was having sex with an older and more experience
woman. Our relationship had to remain a secret, it was best for both
of our sakes.

4

As our plane circumnavigated the edge
of Africa flying at high altitude offshore over the rolling swells of
the Atlantic Ocean I imagined that the lights I saw were the lights
of various seaside cities of African countries including those of
Luanda. After the military coup had removed the Portuguese Marcello
Caetano regime in Lisbon Portugal the sun was now fast setting on the
centuries old Portuguese colonial rule in Africa.

In three hundred and thirteen years I
have become the first Zeeman to leave the African continent after our
families three century sojourn on the continent. My grandfathers who
had fought in the Second World War did not leave the continent, they
did not go beyond the Sahara Desert. As a nineteen year second year
BSc student Europe was a foreign continent. I did not know what to
expect. My excitement was contagious. Kate felt my breathless
excitement and was as radiant and flushed like a teenager on her
first date. I could see that she had spent considerable time and
effort on her makeup. Her perfume was expensive and she made an
extraordinary effort to dress as youthfully and stylishly as possible
for an academic. I sensed her vulnerability and I felt a sudden surge
of love for Kate. I kissed her on the cheek and whispered intimately
that I loved her so much. As an older woman it was exactly something
that she wanted to hear not once but a thousand times from me. She
held my hand tightly. I had the window seat as she had promised. I
pressed my forehead against the cabin window and stared at the night
sky and then down at the Continent clothed in darkness. Africa lay
supine below us, she lay waiting for her lover, she lay reclined in
exotic and mysterious splendour, and she lay in erotic repose
somewhere below us at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. To me Africa
was a beautiful black woman, her loins fertile, her strong thighs
parted in enigmatic anticipation of pleasure and her breasts full
like ripe fruit, her lips like honey, her breath like the scent of an
orchard in full blossom, her eyelids like butterflies. I also felt a
surge of love for this continent which was my home. The home of
Hannah Zeeman. I was one of Africa’s many wayward daughters. I had
lied to my parents. My own audacity astonished me. My parents would
not have guessed in a thousand years that their daughter was going on
her first honeymoon with her lover and would be enjoying four
orgasmic weeks of European summer, European sunshine and sex and sex
and sex.

5

Shortly after sunrise we landed in
Madrid. I had no idea of our travel itinerary. It was all rather
vague and up in the air. During the flight she had said that we
would hire a car at the airport and travel down to the Mediterranean
and follow the coastline to Barcelona. After Barcelona we would
travel across the border to France. From France we would go to Italy,
Greece, and Switzerland. From Switzerland we would travel back to
France. After spending some time in Paris we would return to Madrid.
She said we would be criss-crossing many international borders during
ours travels across vast large chunks of European countryside.

Getting through the early morning
peak hour traffic and finding the main road from Madrid to Valencia
took some time. Being the navigator I sat with the map on my lap.
Travelling in the bright summer sunlight across the vast open plains
of Spain we reached Valencia by midday.

6

Irreducibility of the being to
knowledge. Irreducibility of lived reality to knowing. And we have a
question of priority, consciousness or being. Truth supervenes on
being.

7

It was past midday, feeling famished
we found ourselves on the outskirts of Valencia driving through the
suburbs in a seawards direction. We continued driving seawards until
we found a restaurant that spilled out over onto a stony beach with
the Mediterranean Sea lapping languidly onto a sleepy shoreline. I
realized that it was a Friday afternoon. Chairs and tables had been
arranged in a scattered sprawling fashion on the uneven sloping
surface of the beach. Sitting down at a table I felt the back legs of
my chair sinking into the sand. Kate suggested that we order paella
and a bottle of red wine. Two or three metres from our table sat five
young men, possibly in their late teens or early twenties, lounged
around their table, leaning back in their chairs drinking wine and
talking. They had finished their meal, which seemed to have been
paella. Having removed their shirts they sat bare chested in their
jeans enjoying the summer glow of the warm Mediterranean sun on their
bodies.

Like the boys sitting across from us
we were in no hurry to go anyway. The meal, the wine and the sun made
me feel pleasantly sleepy. We felt completely unburdened of care and
worries. Falling under that contagious and liberating sense of
seaside holiday freedom we felt no urgency do anything or be
anywhere. Eventually after coffee and vanilla ice cream we set out to
look for a place to spend the night. After travelling for thirty
kilometres or so we found lodgings in a suitably modest and cheap
beachfront establishment in a small town. We booked into a single
room with a double bed and balcony overlooking the ocean. Even
though it was the peak of the European holiday season we managed to
find similar kinds of lodgings in small towns or villages along the
coast away from the popular tourist beaches and hotspots. Every
morning at six before breakfast Kate insisted that we go for a run.
Kate was obsessed with exercising. We ate breakfast and we ate
supper, and we ate nothing else in between. I lost quite a bit of
weight, not that I was bothered about losing weight. While I was
generally fit from swimming, all this other daily physical exercise
left me feeling as strong as a lioness. But being with someone like
Kate also made me feel as randy as bonobo chimpanzee on heat.

In Europe for the first time I became
aware of the existence of pornography. My gut reaction against
pornography was that it misrepresented and possibly displaced the
naturalness of human sexuality whether it be homosexual or
heterosexual. For me personally homosexuality was not unnatural.

8

As a lesbian I have often swam
against the current. I am conscious of the fact that writing about
my own life experiences in the so-called spectral realm of lesbian
love and romance has been unavoidable. I say spectral realm because
historically speaking lesbians have mostly lived hidden lives as
ghosts who are plainly invisible in the midst of life. We are like
the Naiads of Greek mythology, nymphs or female spirits, inhabiting
niches associated with water such as springs, streams, fountains or
ponds, and water is a feminine symbol.

9

Kate as a feminist was vehemently
critical of pornography. I agreed with her that pornography
represented a degradation of women. But later in life as a Marxist I
came to view pornography as the commodification of sex through the
economic exploitation of the female body, this form of sexual
exploitation necessarily entails the degradation of women under the
rule of the patriarchy.

10

Kate was a fashion-conscious
feminist. She was critical of the stereotypical view that lesbians
dressed like slobs and did not worry about their bodies or
appearance. Kate was conscious of her appearance. Like her I was also
appearance conscious. If I looked good, I felt good. I enjoyed
feeling sexy, and to feel sexy you had to look sexy. I have always
been interested in the erotics of the visual pleasure associated with
the lesbian gaze. There is a definite non-heterosexual or homosexual
specificity to what excites the erotic visual pleasure of the lesbian
gaze especially when it comes to female fashion magazines. Lesbians
do in fact enjoy same-sex visual pleasure when looking at
heterosexual fashion magazines such as Elle or Vogue. Lesbian fashion
has not really undergone any creative developments mainly because the
female garment market sees the lesbian consumer of clothing a bad and
risky financial bet. Hence the neglect of lesbian fashion
consciousness and the intrusion of heterosexual femininity into the
lesbian same-sex gaze. The feminist political agenda has not helped
lesbians in their natural quest and desire to express same-sex queer
eroticism and sexuality through clothing, dress and fashion. Lesbian
feminist activists have made heavy political and social investments
into anti-fashion politics. Even as a budding Communist I could not
support feminist anti-fashion politics.

11

Lesbians as a community have much to
learn from gay men who have led by example in their creative
expressions of ‘sartorial savvy’ when it comes the gay discourse
on taste and the visual pleasure of the same-sex erotic gaze.
Clothing, fashion and dress function as essential visual and erotic
codes with regard to queer identity and recognisability.

12

It is impossible and also unnatural
for a lesbian not to look narcissistically at a beautiful woman
without experiencing the erotic desire to look like her and to
possess her sexually. And this happens when a lesbian looks at a
women’s fashion magazine. There is a profound paradox and irony to
the lesbian experience of visual pleasure when looking at female
fashion models in women magazines. Very often all the erotic codes,
symbols and imagery which animate any women’s fashion magazine
become visually apparent within a textual context that is
characterized by the conspicuous visual absence of any form of male
iconic or pictorial presence. Yet from a Darwinian perspective the
fashionably clothed female body exists only as a sexualized and
erotic ornamentation for the visual pleasure of the male gaze. While
the female body is a familiar topography and terrain of erotic
pleasure for the lesbian this is not the case for men since they are
incapable of experiencing or knowing what it feels like sexually to
be a woman. To men a woman’s body and mind are terra incognita.

Lesbian homoeroticism or same-sex
eroticism also inadvertently animates the pages of women fashion
magazines. The lesbian gaze excites the twofold goal of erotic
desire, and that is the desire to be like the smiling glossy image of
beauty and the desire to possess the living being behind the glossy
picture. In this sense the males heterosexual gaze is forever
frustrated, trapped in a state of alienation and estrangement,
because to truly possess the object of desire one has to become like
that mysterious object of erotic desire in every respect, truth
supervenes on being, and the male heterosexual objectification of the
female body ends up frustrating the experience of erotic fullness or
completeness and consequently male Eros exists in a state of
perpetual deficit. ‘Being’ in this sense is possessing, and
possessing is becoming, becoming supervenes on being, which
constitutes the homoerotic experience of knowing what it must feel
like to be a woman, a woman that is in that state of erotic
excitement and erotic ecstasy. In this sense queer sex attains
completion or ‘Totality’ in a way that heterosexual sexual
experience can never attain.

For me lesbian homoeroticism rocks!
And sex can never get better than sex between two women.

13

Freed in minds and bodies forever
from the phallocentric construction of our civilization so flagrantly
described in the sexual antics of Val the hero in Henry Miller’s
‘Sextus’ we travelled in a state of unabated arousal from
Barcelona through the night by train via Nice to the French Rivera.
Submitting to the pleasures of our bodies on the white sheets of
those warm moon lit Mediterranean nights in Spain the bed sheets
became damp and clinging with the intensity of our erotic passions
for each other. In the bright sunlight of a hot summer’s morning we
arrived in Nice still basking in the radiation of our voluptuous
emotions, we were in love. From Nice we hired a car and travelled to
Cap d’Agde’s world-famous naturist resort for a two days of nude
sun tanning. After Paradise Island on the Bazaruto Archipelago I was
comfortable with being naked in the presence of others. We
experienced at first hand the well-known phenomenon of the banality
of nakedness which in all its fleshly excessiveness and abundance
satiates the voyeuristic gaze, quenching it of its libidinous
excitement, even when hidden behind the uncensored view of
sunglasses. However Kate broke the numbing spell of banality and
stirred a constant ripple of lustful interest as heads turned in the
vortex of her sensuous turbulence, heads possessed by both male and
female turned and gazed in the wake of her procession across their
visual field. There was no doubting that Kate had a magnificent body,
something which seemed to be foreign on European shores. Naked she
was breathlessly spectacular and she was aware of this. Topless we
explored the beaches of the Rivera, lingering in Saint Tropez for a
day and a night before departing by train to Italy. From Turin to
Milan and via Verona and Padua we traced the rail route across Italy
to Venice. From Venice via Bologna we travelled by car to Florence.

14

In Florence we visited the Loggia dei
Lanzi on Pizza della Signoria where we spent some time in the arena
of rape and decapitation. A monument of sculptured forms celebrating
the capture and violent subjugation in marble and bronze of the
erotically voluptuous feminized bodies under the eternal order of
patriarchical power. Pio Fedi’s Rape of Polyxana. Giovanni
Bologna’s Rape of a Sabine. Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Medusa,
with its slain headless feminized body laying sensual and erotically
supine with legs and arms bound to the pedestal under the feet of a
triumphant Perseus. The message is that rape makes women the weaker
sex, rape subdues the feminine body under the reign of the
patriarchy.

And in stark contrast to the
patriarchical infliction of pain, rape and death on the feminine body
we have the discordant intrusion of a misplaced anomaly in the
sculptured form of Donatello's Judith and Holofernes which
destabilizes, and threatens to cancel and erase and make impotent the
subjugating reign of the masculine over the pacified and supine
feminine body. Does this confrontation of opposites symbolize the
politicization of the sexual identity, the feminine versus the
masculine? Kate had bought Henry Miller’s ‘Sexus’ at the
station in Barcelona. She could not put down Henry Miller’s ghastly
and horrid book as she called it. On the drive to Florence after
flipping through the book which seemed to be borderline pornographic
I asked her if she ever had sex with a man. I was surprised when she
said that she had had sex with men on several occasions, the first
time was when she was eighteen. ‘How was it?’ I asked. ‘Bloody
awful, I won’t recommend it,’ she answered. ‘Did you ever want
to have children?’ I asked. ‘Yes there were times that I did
think seriously about having a child, a girl or a boy, I think I
would have made fabulous mother. I suppose the ideal situation would
be have a child while in a permanent lesbian relationship,’ she
said.

15

I had finished ‘Nausea’ and ‘The
Thief’s Journal’. I liked Jean Genet. I liked the fact that he
was both male and female. But I had a problem with Genet’s view of
the feminine as being passive and submissive. With Kate this may have
been true in the beginning with me. I was the passive and submissive
partner. She would initiate sex with me. She was more experienced,
more confident and she knew how to bring me quickly to a climax, she
could do things to me that were exquisitely pleasurable. But my
confidence as her lover was also growing, I also learnt what she
liked, I was learning about her body too, I was learning fast on how
to please her. In fact I was a very fast learner when it came to sex.
In lesbian sex there is no intromitting sexual organ which can
function as the instrument of power and domination as in heterosexual
coitus or male homosexual simulation of coitus. In heterosexual
coitus the politics of sexual consent reinforces the asymmetry of the
male versus female distribution of actual power. Asymmetrical sexual
consent is the foundation of patriarchical socialization, and Val in
Henry Miller’s ‘Sexus’ is an exemplary model of this
socialization phenomenon based on engineered or contrived female
sexual consent. In this sense Henry Miller’s literary oeuvre is
paradoxically politically conservative rather progressive or radical.

16

We listened to a
loud-speaking-American recommend to another equally vocal American
tourist that they should go view Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith
slaying of Holofernes. Later in Naples we did go to the Museo di
Capodimonte and viewed the painting of Judith decapitating
Holofernes. On Paradise Island in the Bazaruto Archipelago I
eventually became with a bit of practice quite skilful at abusing my
expensive diving knife by throwing it into the trunk of a coconut
palm tree. It was quite a big double bladed knife, with a very sharp
blade on one side and also a serrated edge on the other, and I wore
it while diving and I am sure I could easily decapitate a man with
it. I had witnessed the slaughtering and butchering of goats and
sheep, so I knew that a man’s throat could be easily slit in a
flash with my diving knife, despatching a man in this fashion would
be much easier than slaughtering a goat, severing a man’s carotid
artery with a well delivered vicious slash of my diving knife would
drain away his life in seconds.

After a celebratory banquet
Holofernes the commander of a great Assyrian army waits in
anticipation for the imminent arrival of Judith, he waits alone,
secluded in the privacy of his tent, he has stripped off his armour,
his sword, helmet and shield now lie in a heap on the ground next to
his bed on which he now lays prostate in comfortable repose. In
response to his expectation that she was going to have sex with him,
and in a parody of heterosexual femininity, she first performs the
ceremonial bathing of her body in a nearby stream. While waiting for
her his eyes have now grown heavy with the wine and he falls into a
deep dreamless asleep, his drunken body sprawled out on his bed. In
the rendition of the Midrash aggada for the festive celebration of
Hanukkah the story line for the dramatic fiction of Judith avenging
Dinah’s rape is inescapably ‘queer’. The decapitation of
Holofernes by a woman is a symbolic act of castration. The general of
the Assyrian army is reduced to a eunuch, a feminized man. Artemisia
Gentileschi’s Judith is depicted as strong and powerful and she is
as determined as a lioness in the act of pulling down a struggling
bull, and for the occasion of the decapitation she is beautifully and
splendidly dressed up in drag, she and her slave are lesbians, that
much is clear to the discerning and knowing eye. With the strength of
their arms and bodies they quickly subdued the panic stricken general
in his bed, holding him down with their bare arms, Judith first slits
his throat with his own sword and then severs the head from the body.
Judith and her slave woman carry away the severed head of Holofernes
covered on a platter. With a donkey loaded with the war booty that
they have looted from Holofernes’ tent she and the slave set off
for Jerusalem. At the gates of Jerusalem She presents the head of
Holofernes. With the help of her slave, she has otherwise
single-handily liberated the men of Israel and now she too sets her
female slave free before taking her to bed and making love to her.
Mythos and Logos bended together in unveiling the truth.

17

As I have said, my grandfathers never
made it out of Africa, they got no further than Egypt in the North
Africa desert campaign against Rommel during the Second World War.
They did not manage to cross the Mediterranean and reach Italy. I am
the first Zeeman to leave the shores of Africa since the first Zeeman
settled in Africa, he was one of the first Dutchman to set up home in
the Cape of Good Hope. Now I find myself in Italy, and I am only sure
of one thing and that is that I am queer. Apart from God I am not
sure about anything else. I am not sure of my race, and neither is
Kate sure about what I am. She laughs at the darkening of my
pigmentation under the dazzling Mediterranean’s summer sun and
jokes that I could be a North African or maybe a Phoenician woman. A
Phoenician woman! She found her own joke very funny and laughed until
the tears ran down her cheeks. Objectively speaking I am an Afrikaner
if I really have to define my ethnicity. But I speak mainly English.
And now in Italy I feel half-Catholic. And I have become a Phoenician
woman to boot.

So now I am living my own myth,
recreating myself as that mythic being and living out my fantasy with
Kate.

I am now a dark gentile Hellenic
lesbian woman at home in the homoerotic atmosphere of the
Mediterranean seaboard. Across the ocean lies the great continent of
Africa, my actual home and the place of my birth. Africa has always
been part of the Mediterranean cultural and social milieu. The blood
of Africans has mingled over thousands of years with the people that
lived on the shores of this ocean. And like my ancient Hellenic
lesbian sisters who were the very first Christian converts of Saint
Paul I am joined by faith and confession to what has been
characterised culturally and socially as the Orient and the Semitic.
Culturally I am a fusion of the African, the Hellenic and the
Hebraic. I am from the Old World. Ironically Saint Paul was the real
liberator of gentile women in the villages and cities along the coast
of the Mediterranean.

I identify with the great sisterhood
of Hellenic and Hebraic women. The paradigm of heterosexual marriage
was not the essential defining attribute or the inexorable destiny of
the female mythological and historical figures who populated the
crowded and dazzling galaxy of heroines and goddesses who carried the
torch of hope for all womankind. Mythos and Logos becomes welded
together into the great narrative of women breaking the chains of
chattel slavery and bondage under the patriarchical regime of men.
Again I am comfortable in my nakedness under the Mediterranean sun,
minimally dressed up in the sartorial symbols constitutive of being
in drag, in a conscious parody of masculinity and femininity, wearing
only sheer stockings and shining stilettos, my double edged sword
sheathed in its scabbard fixed to my leather suspender, strapped over
my shoulder I carry a quiver of arrows, and in my right hand I carry
a bow, my lips painted bright red with lipstick. I am all things
Greek. I am Penelope weaving, I am the maid servant from Thrace, I am
Demeter the great mother, I am Diotima of Mantinea the woman who is
wise in matters of the erotic, including love and sex, I am Hestia
the maker and sustainer of the home. I am home in my Hellenic
sisterhood.

I am now reading Kate’s Henry
Miller book. It is bulky volume of a book.

I am not like Val in Henry Miller’s
Sextus who can only speak of his prick. Instead I am the alpha female
Hyena with powerful jaws capable of great violence, and a giant
clitoris that is constantly erect, on the brink of an orgasmic
eruption. All males quiver in submission, trembling they cower before
me, I mount each one of them with impunity to show off my dominance
as the female, the great matriarch. They cower castrated before me as
my clitoris hangs heavy between my legs.

Under the Mediterranean sun I have
become black and lovely. Now I am a Hebraic woman. The patriarchy
lays decapitated in passive supine repose, now laying headless at my
sandaled feet.

Judith cut off Holophernes’ head
whereas, contrary to the writings of the Zohar, Esther laid with
Ahasuerus, using sex to acquire benefits for herself. In contrast to
Esther, Queen Vashti refusing to debase herself before Ahasuerus even
though he was her husband, emerges in the Book of Esther as the real
heroine. According to the Mĕgillāh which is read during Purim,
Esther was one of the four most beautiful women, and the four women
of surpassing beauty were Sarah, Rahab, Abigail and Esther. On her
way to Ahasuerus’ bed Esther recited Psalm 22 in which she referred
to herself as the ‘hind of the morning’, meaning her vagina was
tight and narrow, and would remain tight and narrow for the pleasure
of Ahasuerus every time he mounted and penetrated her with his sword.
On each occasion that Ahasuerus had sex with Esther it was like
fucking a virgin for the first time. If certain mitzvot should never
be transgressed then why did Esther enjoy sex with a non-believing
heathen rather than choosing martyrdom? The ‘Tractate Sanhedrin’
recommends that the betrothed girl should rather be slain than
ravaged by a heathen. Well such are the paradoxes that emerge in the
creative weaving of Mythos and Logos that goes into the creation of
literary fiction. And is this not what literature should wrestle with
in its narration of things, in its struggle to say something of
ultimate significance about something. Can any serious literary
endeavour escape from addressing things of ultimate concern, can it
escape the reach of Mythos and Logos and still be able to say
something about something? To say something significant about
something involves a transubstantiation because all meaning
represents the incarnation of the Word of God, the Logos. This is my
body, this is my blood, eat and drink ye all of it.

In terms of the Hebraic I am Judith,
I am Deborah, I am Tamara dressed as a harlot on the side of road, I
am Ruth. I am bathed in the sun of the Mediterranean. My skin is
dark.

In the case of the Greek goddess
Hestia, the word sustainer used to describe what she does is a deeply
theological term. God is the ultimate sustainer of all things. In
Italy the sound of church bells reminds the faithful of Mass.

18

Sitting naked on the hotel bed in
Rome I am beautifully tanned, dark as a berry, and my hair which
shimmers in the Mediterranean sun is now glossy, long and shines
raven black after Kate has brushed it. Kate is in a state of saintly
rapture. As devout Catholic she joyfully confesses that to really
find God one has to come to Rome. Saint Paul came to Rome, Saint
Peter came to Rome. We are in the City of Saints. She reminds me that
we are in the Eternal City, we breathe with every breath the
Vatican’s heavy presence. Kate speaking passionately in a tone
filled with missionary zeal, confiding urgently that every true
believer eventually takes the road to Rome even if it is only
metaphorically. Finished with my hair she tells me stand up. Kate has
become my mother, my sister, my best girlfriend, my lover.
Obediently like her slave, I stand up and she applies creams and
lotions to my naked body. Rubbing in the creamy lotions, her hands
caressing every crevice, every curve, and every hollow of my body,
she brings me to a state of pleasant arousal. She mutters like a
mother that I have been exposed to too much sun, and I tell her that
I have never been sunburnt in my all life. She whispers that she has
never felt such a beautiful smooth silky skin in all her life. I
burst out laughing. Now standing behind me she puts her arms around
me and she pulls me tightly against her body, I feel her hands
caressing and fondling my breasts while rubbing in the lotion. She
feels my arousal in my erect nipples. She rubs my swollen and
engorged vulva and my clitoris which is now fully erect has popped
out of its hood and waits in eager readiness for her mouth, for her
tongue. She kisses the back of my neck and nibbles my ear lobes. Her
hand slips down again to my vulva which has now become moist. She
forces me down onto the bed, while lying on my back she is all over
me with her mouth and she makes love to me while the warm morning sun
shines down on us through the open window, and the bustling sounds of
the Eternal City filter into our small modest hotel room, and the
Cathedral bells ring for morning Mass.

Inside the cathedral it is always
cool. I have lost count of all the cathedrals that we have visited in
Spain, the south of France and now in Italy. I have lost count of the
number of candles that we lit at the feet of the Virgin Mary. I now
also whisper before the Blessed Virgin who has also become my Mother:
‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou
amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy
Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of
death. Amen’.

What pathos: ‘pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of death’. At the hour of our death Mother Mary
will meet us and point to us Jesus, to our Lord, the God who died on
a Roman Cross on Golgotha and rose on the third day and left
Jerusalem on foot to meet up with the disciples on a beach in
Galilee.

I think I am going to become a
Catholic. As an Anglican I am halfway there.

19

Dear reader you have been my faithful
companion on a long and tortuous journey. Male or female I view you
dearest reader as my romantic partner. We have got this far together.
On a quiet day when the wind blows in a particular direction I can
hear the flow of traffic in Rome like the coming and going of the
tides or like the distant sounds of crashing surf. After making love
with Kate I fall asleep thinking about artificial intelligence and
machine existence in which sex and desire no longer feature in that
timeless state of machine existence. The absence of sex and desire is
the essential feature of timeless or immortality, and that idea goes
all the way back to Parmenides’ poetic critique of Hesiod’s
Theogony. Beyond time, beyond becoming and beyond sexuality we have
immortality. In Rome, the Eternal City, shadowless the day becomes
night and the night fades imperceptivity into day disappearing in
plain sight. Late at night in the unremitting glare of the
tungsten100 watt light bulb hanging from the ceiling in our hotel
room, lying naked close together, we read before we sleep. While in
Spain and also on the French Riviera with the break of each dawn I
woke up hearing the distant sounds of surf rushing up the beach. The
echo of the percussion of the rolling swells reminded me that I was
still on the shores of the Mediterranean. I have bought a note book
and I am keeping my journal, early each morning before our mandatory
run I write notes, my mind is fresh, the recollections of yesterday I
rework in my mind before jotting them down like Penelope reworks her
tapestry each day. What I have woven during the day I unweave at
night in my sleep. I hide my journal from Kate in its secret
compartment in my suitcase. Having finished reading ‘Sexus’ which
I read late into the night, the only English book I could find in
Rome was an English translation of Plato’s drama or book called the
‘Phaedo’ with the dialogue scenes set within the walls of a
prison cell, where Socrates has been left to languish on the shores
of infinity with nothing else to do other than to drink his cup of
hemlock. I did not realize that Socrates had a wife, which he had
hastily removed from his prison cell because he could not stand the
aggravation of her weeping. Oh the poor woman!

Under the spell of Rome I often
found myself wondering about existence beyond the body, beyond the
material, beyond the physical. Why else believe in the resurrection
of the dead. There were times I found myself praying to God and
realized that deep down I was a true believer and I could not
understand why Father Francis Digby let it all go so easily. In Rome
on our last day in Italy Kate made the sign of the cross in the
Sistine Chapel. Following the graceful movement of her hand I too
signed myself with the sign of the cross and Kate looked at me in
askance surprise and I too wondered for what reason I had never
signed myself before with the sign of the cross. I was still only
half-way to becoming a Catholic.

Kate had beautiful hands, her fingers
were elegant, whenever we laid together her fingers found their home
in my vagina where they explored the familiar spaces unseen. She
crooked her fingers and pressed them towards my pubic bone against
the base of my clitoris while her tongue caressed the swollen
protruding hemisphere that had emerged shining with the lustre of a
large pink pearl from its bed of soft folds, at the same time she
began to move her fingers inside me, overwhelmed with intense and
uncontrollable excitement my pelvis rose, my vulva with unremitting
urgency pressing, pushing and thrusting against her lips, my thighs
spread wide apart, my feet and calves writhing on the sheets, my toes
curled, my chest heaved, my arms splayed out and my ears filled with
the most unbelievable voluptuous moans as I gave myself over like an
animal once to more to the depths of a bottomless orgasm. Kate also
in a heighted state of excitement brought herself to a climax with
her left hand between her thighs she rubbed, stroked and fingered
herself while bent down over me. Cuddling in each other’s arms,
awash with tenderness and lips pressed together in soft kisses,
breathing in her fragrance, with her moist silky skin against mine we
fell asleep naked in our embrace.

20

It was a hot Sunday afternoon when we
arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris from Zurich. Like a child I kept
on asking Kate if could we go up the Eiffel Tower after sun set. She
agreed but only after having an afternoon nap. At the station I
bought a French phrase book, a street map of Paris and a Paris
tourist guidebook. I was now equipped to conquer Paris. From the
station our taxi dropped us off in the Latin Quarter by the Hotel du
Levant Paris in the Rue de la Harpe.

While Kate had her nap I decided to
go for a walk. It was with some reluctance that she allowed me to go.
It was the first sign of her wanting to cling to me and control me.
She was hoping that we would take a nap together like we had often
done so far and afterwards feeling fresh and amorous we would make
love, shower, get dressed and go out until past midnight. She had got
into a routine of how we would spent our days and nights. She tried
to plan everything to death on what we were going to do next. So it
was a relief to be alone for a while and free to do what I felt like
doing, without having to second guess what Kate had in mind. Going
down the lift I flipped through pages of the tour guidebook. Getting
out of the lift I continued to browse through the guide while walking
through the foyer to the glass hotel entrance/exit door. The name of
Sartre and a café called Les Deux Magots caught my eye. I had
finished reading Nausea and I had become an instant fan of Jean-Paul
Sartre. From Rue de la Harpe I walked to the intersection with the
Boulevard Saint-Germain and within minutes I was standing on the
pavement outside Les Deux Magots. The tourist guide book said that
not only Sartre, but also Simone de Beauvoir, Earnest Hemingway,
Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht and James
Baldwin among many others had frequented the now famous café as
their chosen rendezvous and place of literary labour. In the bright
light of a Parisian summer it felt as if I was standing on holy
ground.

21

A day after my last exam and a few
days before I left for the overseas trip I went home to Hotazel. At
dinner it was just mom, dad and myself at table. It was then that she
raised the issue that the most money had been spent on me. My holiday
the year before to the Bazaruto Archipelago had cost a fortune and
now my trip to Europe was also costing a fortune. My dad just smiled
at me when my mom was not looking. I did write a long letter of
thanks to my parents from Spain and I sent it to them by airmail, I
also sent Elsabe and Malcolm postcards almost every day. This did
help a bit to salve my feelings of guilt.

22

Now a year later after my Vilanculos
trip I am standing outside the Les Deux Magots in the Latin Quarter
of Paris, I am nineteen years old and I am in a love relationship
with a woman in her thirties her who is also one of my lecturers,
lecturing mycology and crytogamic botany. Once again I felt highly
educated and very worldly in a wanton fashion especially after
reading Nausea, The Thief’s Journal, and Henry Miller’s Sexus,
and also because of the fact that I was being fucked by Kate day and
night at almost every opportunity. I don’t think that any girl in
existence has ever had as many orgasms as I have experienced on a
daily basis while being on holiday with Kate. Having perpetual sex
had become a way of life it seemed. Henry Miller’s Val has nothing
on us and we don’t even have pricks.

Paris was another universe compared
to the innocence of turquoise seas, palms tree and white beaches of
Santa Carolina Island. Vilanculos and the Bazaruto Archipelago was a
holiday of beautiful innocence and perfect purity. Now light years
away from Santa Carolina I was alone, less innocent and less pure, on
the streets of Paris for a few hours on a glorious summer’s
afternoon while Kate was getting her beauty sleep. Compared to last
year when I was still a very young and naïve first year student I
have now become a young woman of the world, experienced in the ways
of the world and the female body thanks to Kate’s prodigious
appetite for sex.

I sit down at one of the tables on
the sidewalk and quickly open my French phrase book. I open the book
by the section on ordering beverages in a restaurant, and I read as
fast as I can through the different ordering options:

Waiter!... Garçon! ( garhsawn!)

I’d like…je voudrias ( zhuh
voo-dray)

A white coffee…un café au lait (
uñ ka-fay oh lay)

The waiter arrives at my table, he
sees the map of Paris and notices my French phrase book. Obviously I
am a tourist, but a very young tanned and sexy tourist with nice legs
and a nice sensual body, and a pretty face, long glossy dark hair and
bright red lipstick lips. I am one of those very feminine lipstick
lesbians, but he does not know that.

I smile the most flirtatious Parisian
smile and say as sweetly as possible:

‘Je voudrias un café au lait….’

His face breaks into the most
beatific smile. It is the first time in my life that I have ever
flirted with a man.

23

Kate has made me her confidant. After
we have made love we lie in each other’s arms. She is vulnerable,
she tells me that I am so young and beautiful, and she confesses that
she loves me with all her heart and cares for me deeply. She wants to
hear that I love her too, and so I tell her that I love her. I do
love her. I have ‘feelings’ for her and I care for her. At the
same I also wondered whether one day I will be like her clinging
desperately to the body of a younger woman as I too began to feel my
fading youthfulness slipping away with the creeping onset of the
autumn of my own life. Kate spoke a lot about her struggles with her
career ambitions. She was a senior lecturer and had submitted in her
ad hominem application for promotion to become an associate
professor.

24

I hear the percussion of high heels.
I turn and see an attractive woman possibly in her late thirties
wearing a summers dress. She sits down by the table across from me.
After she has ordered coffee she lights up a cigarette, she draws and
exhales, we exchange curious glances, our eyes remain fixed on each
other and I smile spontaneously at her, she returns my smile and
cocks a questioning eyebrow at me as my smiling gaze remains fixed on
her face. We both know that we are queer. She quickly sizes up the
situation, seeing the French phrase book and the map of Paris. She
asks me in perfect but French accented English.

‘Are you on holiday in Paris?’

‘Yes,’ I answer.

‘Where are you from?’

‘I am from South Africa.’

She is surprised. She asks if I
would like to have another coffee. I join her at her table. I feel my
knees pressing against her knees, she does not move her knees away.
We talk and her hand soon covers my hand. She asks if I like sex and
tell her I love having sex. We go to her flat which is in the Latin
Quarter close to the Sorbonne, close to our hotel. In her flat I
explain that I don’t have much time because my family expects back
soon for supper. We make love. She wants to use a dildo on me, I
resist explaining that I don’t want a dildo in my vagina or anus.
She understands. I feel her fingers slipping into my vagina and also
probing into my anus. Afterwards we lie naked on her bed. She lights
up a cigarette and we speak. She is a writer and a journalist. I tell
her that I am a student and I am studying to be a zoologist. I also
tell her about my new found interest in Sartre and Genet. She laughs
good-naturedly and then tells me bluntly that Sartre is now passé,
he is a senile old man, and that no one thinks much of him anymore.
She explains that there is a new generation of philosophers, and she
rattles off the names of Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze.
She asks if I am a Marxist. Without thinking I say yes and she
chuckles. You are such as a sweet girl she tells me. She then says:
‘I suppose you going to tell me that you are also a Communist’.
Again I say yes without knowing why, and she laughs, her eyes are
dancing with humour.

‘You are a sweet, innocent and pure
girl, do not ever change, the world can only become a better place
with people like you.’

She then held me tightly in her arms
and whispered in my ear saying that she wished we could be lovers
forever.

‘You better be going, my partner
will soon be coming home from work,’ she says, releasing me and
getting up from the bed she slips on a night gown.

It was seven-o-clock when I left her
flat. When I got back to the hotel Kate was in a state. She was
extremely angry, verging on the brink of hysteria. We had our first
serious fight.

‘Where have you been, I was worried
sick, I am responsible for you, and why do you smell of cigarettes?’

I shouted back at her: ‘We always
just do what you want to do and you never ask me what I would like to
do. Everything revolves you and what you want.’

‘You know that that is not true!
Tell me now what you would like to do for the rest of our holiday.’

She then burst into tears, sitting
down on the edge of bed she began to sob. I sat down next to her and
put arm around her shoulders and kissed her on the neck and cheek. I
felt bad and said that I loved her.

‘I love you too,’ she answered as
she turned and embraced me tightly.

‘I love you so much,’ she
repeated, as she pressed her hot tear soaked cheek against mine.

It is still our very first day in
Paris and the day shows no promise of ever ending, in spite of all of
what has already happened to me. After a quick shower and a fresh
change of clothes we step out into the streets of a city that were
still bathed in golden sunlight. In the space of two hours I have
made love to two women before the sun has even set. Paris the city of
lights and the city of love seems to have lived up to its reputation.
And neither of the two will ever know of the existence of the other
unless we bump into her. I hope not, but I would like to see her
again, the French woman. Her name is Monique Brouillet. Was I going
to fall in love with Monique before nightfall descended on Paris?

We debate whether to have supper now
or later. Kate is careful to let me decide what we should do. We are
both famished, I think it would be good idea if we eat first before
walking along the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. I open the Paris tourist
book. I suggest we go to the Café de Flore. What if Monique happened
to turn up at the Café de Flore? Kate meet Monique. Monique meet
Kate. Who I am? What kind of person am I? I am a mystery even to
myself.

25

Journal entry.

Dear reader you may feel inclined to
judge me harshly regarding my infidelities with Kate. Have I not
expressed strong views on the foundations of morality and
responsibility as something that concerns the conscience? Have I not
hinted that morality or moral action or moral agency is actually
caused by the awakening of conscience when gazing upon the face of
the Other? I do not wish to excuse myself. I did feel bad at the time
given the facts of the situation. In a way I did betray Kate. I can
imagine just how shocked she would have been if she knew what I had
done behind her back while she was napping.

26

You may think that I have no
conscience, that I have been sluttish and immoral.

27

But the operative word here is
‘cause’. The expression on the face of the Other causes the
awakening of conscience and having gazed upon the face of the Other
we feel compelled to act responsibly as moral agents to uphold what
is good and true and beautiful. Was it uncontrollable lust or was it
curiosity that drove me into Monique’s bed? Was it a lapse of
conscience? I don’t think it was mere lust or desire. Ok then, I do
admit that I did find Monique desirable, I did feel the awakening of
desire, I did entertain the prospect of what it would it feel like to
be with her in bed. Maybe she could sense it. Maybe my face was
filled with unmistakable lasciviousness. Women don’t feel lust. It
is men that lust after women. In a way I was acting out of curiosity
and not lust. I did not give in to desire. I just felt like having
sex. I was in the mood for a sexual encounter and wanted to be
fondled, kissed and caressed and brought to an exquisite climax by a
beautiful and interesting woman. I also wanted to feel what it was
like for me to make love to this woman who was a perfect stranger in
a strange city. I was ready for adventure. And I suppose I was hot. I
was a bitch.

But still, as I write these journal
entries I cannot help thinking about the operative words that are key
to understanding the drama, or in other words the dramatic event
which took place one afternoon in Paris, and the two specific words
that I happen to be thinking of are ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ and
the role they play, a role in explicating the relationship between
consciousness and the body or the mind and the body. My act of
adventurous infidelity with Monique was a mind-body problem that
needed to be solved. Other thoughts begin to intrude, I must also
write them done. There is the issue of empathy, empathy can be viewed
as a faculty, the faculty which makes the experience of conscience
possible. The experience of empathy and conscience are themselves
forms of consciousness. And still more thoughts intrude themselves
into my mind, new thoughts which I know are somehow all
interconnected with the drama of my little Paris adventure.

28

Also in terms of the mind-body
problem I can say for sure from my own experiences that many women
enjoy being touched, felt, ‘fingered’, fondled, kissed and
caressed by a woman. I love being brought to a climax. A woman’s
body is designed for pleasure, it is superbly adapted for the
physical experience of pleasure, ecstasy and orgasm, and it is for
this purpose that the entire body of a woman, every part of her
anatomy has been adapted, adapted to experience erotic pleasure and
in this sense a woman’s body is the perfect sex organ, it is erotic
in its entirety from head to foot, especially for a women who happens
to be a lipstick lesbian like myself. A woman, and especially a queer
woman, is the full and perfect embodiment of a sexual being, of an
erotic being, of a being seeking erotic pleasure and ecstasy.

29

In his Theogony, Hesiod expounded on
the myth of Pandora. It was through Pandora that the race of women
brought both sex and death into world of men. Pandora the first woman
was not born she was crafted from mud by Hephaestus the master
craftsman of the gods. The unborn Pandora came alive from clay, from
matter as it were, as an artefact, as an artistically created
artefact, shaped into a sensual being who was not supposed to become
an erotic body for mere sexual reproduction. Before Pandora there was
peace and harmony on earth among men. But then Prometheus stole the
fire from the gods, an act more audacious than the building of the
Tower of Babel, and Hephaestus was instructed to make Pandora the
instrument for the punishment of man. With the coming of Pandora
humankind became divided into two races, divided into two different
kinds of separate beings, man and woman. And sexuality had entered
the world through the agency and being of women, it was this which
also brought about an asymmetry into the world of conscious beings,
resulting in the difference between the self and the Other, creating
a rupture between the self and the Other. The asymmetry of sexuality
resulted in the dualism of identity and difference which in turn
transformed humans into a divided beings, and the estranged ‘self’
as a consequence of this event could only become self-identical with
the Other through LESBIANISM. So while man represents mankind women
represent only their own sex and it was through this
self-recognition, this self-representation, this self-mirroring in
the face of the Other, that women overcome the dualism of self and
Other, and the dualism of identity and difference, and the dualism
of being and difference. Difference vanished in women with the being
of women becoming self-identical to itself through the recognition of
self in the mirror of the Other. And so, only women can fully know
the body of women, especially when it comes to the pleasure of sex.
For men the women’s body as an artistic creation from the
formlessness of mud remains forever a terra incognita. As terra
incognita it can only be ploughed by men like the conquered and
domesticated earth and sown with seed or semen. This is how man
punish women for dividing humanity into male and female. Men punish
women by penetrating their bodies with their swords, filling their
vaginas with ejaculum, just as the husbandman tears the earth open
with his plough in order to sow the seed, and the earth like the
woman’s body lays supine and spread out in passive repose ready for
the husbandman to do his work.